1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a data inquiry system for three-dimensional (3D) location-based image, video, and information, and the inquiry method thereof, and more particularly to a data inquiry system, a data inquiry method for 3D location-based image, video, and information using space parameters and lens parameters to determine space coordinates of objects.
2. Description of the Related Art
At present, people can use a mobile phone with a global positioning system (GPS) sensor to locate themselves and further retrieve the knowledge and information of a geographic site in which they are visiting. In the existing prior art, a user can use a handheld device with a camera to take a picture on a object they feel interested and then the handheld device can utilize the image recognition technologies for detecting the object in the photo. For example, if tourists want to learn more about Eiffel Tower in France during their visits, the tourists simply need to use a mobile phone to take the picture of the Eiffel Tower, and an image recognition program installed in the mobile phone detects the tower and retrieves related information of the Eiffel Tower from a database via the Internet and shows related information to users. However, it is a challenging job to detect various different kinds of objects on earth with 100% accuracy. In addition to the image recognition, other known prior art uses latitude and longitude data of a GPS sensor installed on a mobile device to show the geographic location of the device as the location of the user, and roughly describes the information about the neighborhood of a scenic spot. However, the location of such mobile device cannot describe the user's interested object or photo taken for the object precisely, and thus cannot obtain the actual information related to the object. For example, a tourist visiting a park sees mountains around the park and wants to learn about a particular mountain, while taking a photo of or searching the mountain by a mobile phone, the GPS installed in the mobile phone cannot locate the position of the mountain accurately, and thus cannot provide the related knowledge and information of the mountain.
In view of the aforementioned issue of an image data inquiry system, some patented technologies are used in a mobile device such as a digital camera and a global positioning system (GPS) receiver as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 7,146,179 entitled “Portable imaging device employing geographic information to facilitate image access and viewing”. This method can obtain related information of the location of a photographer or an object, but cannot confirm the related information about the direction or the position of the photographed object.
In another solution to the aforementioned problem, a plurality of more complicated and larger stacked camera modules are used, such that the exposure value of each different camera can be used for obtaining the direction and the height of an image of a photo taken. With the data of the direction and the height of the image, the relation of the spatial image of the object can be computed in a way as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 7,126,630 entitled “Method and apparatus for omni-directional image and 3-dimensional data acquisition with data annotation and dynamic range extension method”. However, this method incurs higher cost with complexity for a client device and such device cannot be carried easily.
Since the photo or video information recorded by the traditional methods actually shows the location of the photographer (or the camera equipment), but not the location of the photo itself, therefore users cannot obtain the desired information about the observed object through the GPS recording and service of a traditional way of taking a photo, or further obtain other photos and video related to the photographed object or information and knowledge about the object from such system. Obviously, such application is inconvenient.
In view of the foregoing shortcomings of the prior art, the inventor of the present invention based on years of experience to conduct extensive researches and experiments, and finally developed a data inquiry system, a data inquiry method and a data creating method for location-based image, video, and information in accordance with the present invention to overcome the shortcomings of the prior art.